U2 @ TCF I: The Anticipation

I can sum up being at the U2 concert at TCF Bank Stadium in Minneapolis in one line: It was like being inside a Don Delillo novel. But so you don’t have to run out and read his twelve or so novels, gentle reader, let me narrow it down: it was like being in Delillo’s novel Underworld. Now all you have to read is 800 or so pages.

“The future belongs to crowds,” Delillo famously wrote in another of his novels, Mao II. That theme, the group magnetism and indelible imprint of crowds upon individuals, shows up again in the opening scene of Underworld: the one game playoff for the National League pennant between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers at Polo Grounds in 1951, the game in which Bobby Thomson hit a ninth inning home run off Ralph Branca to win the game for the Giants, a hit that would come to be known as “the shot heard ‘round the world.” Delillo masterfully points his lens around the stadium at this event, showing us the lives of both celebrities and nobodies, but he paints the identity of the crowd that day as something impassioned, desperate, supplicating. In Delillo’s portrayal of the stadium event, of the arena, individuals become both strong and vulnerable, they get swept up in timelessness and are at the mercy of history, they become the targets of both genius and terror.

We arrived at the stadium at 2:15 for the 7:00 show, earlier than my wife wanted, but later than my sister-in-law, an avid concert goer, would have liked. The plan was to grab something to eat at a semi-trendy restaurant in the area, the heart of the University of Minnesota, then stand in line for maybe an hour until the gates opened to general admission fans at 4:30.

In the car on the way up, we began to hear rumors of what we were in for: people who had camped out overnight in order to be the first ones into the arena. Upon arrival, then, we went to check out the length of the line. It extended for perhaps a quarter-mile. Event workers were handing out purple adhesive bracelets upon which they were writing numbers in black Sharpie. Once we realized this, the plan was out the window. I became number 980.

“The future belongs to crowds.”

The CSC Event worker told us that they planned to “move us up” at 2:30. We didn’t really know what “move us up” meant, but we knew it had to be important, so the new plan was to wait until “they moved us up,” then to leave my sister-in-law in line while my wife and I went to get food and brought it back to her.

While we waited, we oriented ourselves to our place in line. Ahead of us were two younger couples, in their early twenties by the looks of it: heavy makeup on one of the young women that said high school was not too far behind her; a buff, young athlete-look to one of the males; rings on one couple but not the other. They were already decked out in U2 garb; one of the young women wore a One t-shirt, the aid organization founded by Bono whose goal it is to wipe out extreme poverty, mainly through marshaling international government aid.

Behind us were two women of an ethnicity not Caucasian, then a Caucasian man; they were not together. However, they were comparing notes about whom had been to what concert, and it turns out the guy was a rock star of U2 concerts—132 shows total in his life, concerts hit on this leg of the tour having included Chicago, two shows in Montreal, Toronto, Denver, Utah, now Minneapolis, and he would be boarding a plane the next morning for the upcoming show in Pittsburgh. I looked over this fan of fans: a somewhat disheveled man in his late forties, graying, sitting in a camping chair with a cooler full of liquid at his feet. I figured he was single until he confessed—lied?—that his wife packed the cooler for him. “You’re gonna just leave the chair?” someone asked him once we were told we couldn’t bring any big items with us.

“It’s like two-fifty at the dollar store, man” he responded.

Moving up happened a little later than promised, about 2:45. We moved about 100 yards, then stopped, recamped, my sister-in-law setting herself up under a small avenue tree to hide from a sun that occasionally peaked through heavy if unfocused clouds and sent the temperatures into the upper eighties. The forecast was for serious storms so I kept searching the sky to the southwest, though that view was blocked by the faux brick of TCF Bank Stadium, the corporate title hierarchically printed above the names of each individual county where tax dollars grow on green stalks of a variety of thicknesses and make their way here—only symbolically, of course—to the crown jewel of the state university: a stadium for a perennially losing football team. (By this time in the afternoon, I’ve already thought and said “TCF Bank Stadium” so much that I’ve begun to subconsciously transfer my funds to said bank, agog at the benefits of their “free checking” program.)

My wife and I marched back around the building to the far side where we had parked, and as we did so we heard the sound checks for the evening, including significant riffs from a number of songs that I assumed would be on the set list that night. To the southwest the stadium is open and we stopped momentarily to get our first look at “the claw,” a huge, arched tripod that is the show. The lights and sound for the show hang primarily from this claw with the stage propped in the middle above which hangs a round video screen that projects what’s happening on stage, creating a 360 degree viewing venue and maximizing arena performances. Thus the tour is called the 360 Tour. It’s supposed to be state of the art and looks space age. Rumor has it that it takes three days to set up. No doubt it’s patented and all that. They also want to sell them now for other tours. Go figure.

Two streets over where we want to get lunch, Washington Avenue, is completely torn up. This information was also what prompted our 2:15 arrival. Multiple media outlets were warning about congestion due to lack of parking and road construction. Get prepaid parking, arrive early, and use public transportation were the three mantras, in descending order, that concert goers were encouraged to consume and regurgitate in order to avoid mass chaos. We opted for the second choice and had our pick of parking at the first lot we tried.

We conquered Washington Avenue on foot and brought back pork lo mein, moo shoo pork, and spring rolls to share with my sister-in-law on the curbside by 3:15. By 4:00, the anticipated “second move,” everyone stood up without prompting.

For nothing. We didn’t move again until 4:30, the official time for the gates to open. In the meantime, though, no one sat. This was time for more people watching. Up ahead, a man in his fifties, balding but with long blond hair hanging down his back, kept up a ruckus about being from Canada. A woman with short blond hair and a U2 tattoo on her upper arm also walked by a couple of times.

My sister-in-law had acquainted herself with one of the women directly behind us. Doris was from New Mexico, had been to shows primarily out west, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Denver, and now Minneapolis because she had relatives here. “Where are you from originally?” I asked.

“I’m Santa Fe,” she says, answering questions of place origin and ethnic origin all in one. Doris is a small business owner and a flamenco dancer and was once photographed for a book about the people and places of New Mexico and the picture ended up in the governor’s office where she also ended up lobbying for small business owners—to no avail. She’s also religious. “I grew up Baptist,” she says, but has also volunteered to help the Carmelite Nuns in New Mexico who recommended a Chinese acupuncturist after her father had a stroke. The acupuncturist helped the father immensely. “It was a miracle,” she says, “Praise Jesus.”

I’m from a small town. We have our own colorful people though we’re primarily the same color. But we have no Doris. I am swept away by her narrative, enthralled. Later, I overhear that she’ll be having her fortieth class reunion soon. Doris is ballpark 58.

Doris also characterizes a U2 concert as “a spiritual experience.” She’s not the first to do so; nor will she be the last. In fact, I myself have held onto a quote from a 1987 Time Magazine article in which someone said, “U2 is what church should be.” I flash the quote now for Doris, who’s appreciative.

Later, I’ll watch a piece from KARE 11 news that is full of wonderful, over the top sound bites from my fellow fans who are ahead of me in the line. Several of them react to a set of storms that passed through in the morning. Ann-Marie Lee of Milwaukee, whose name, complexion, and accent suggest that she’s probably Hmong says for the camera, “This is a spiritual pilgrimage and we’ll be here no matter how bad the weather gets” (Tessman). The tattoo lady, though, is Nicole Retzer, a home grown fanatic from St. Paul. “Bono signed my arm and then the Edge signed my arm,” Ratzer says of her run-in with the band at the 2005 concert, “and then the next morning I went and had [the signatures] tattooed over.”

The future belongs to crowds—and to cameras videotaping crowds, or to cameras videotaping individuals trying to stand out from or ride the wave of crowds. Ms. Retzer isn’t done. The next question that reporter Renee Tessman asks must have been something like, “Are you worried about getting rained out tonight?” To which Retzer replies, “Bono has, I think, direct communication with, or is some kind of higher power. So I’m not worried about it.”

Another thing that passes the time is the volunteers coming around signing people up for Bono’s causes. The One people leave us alone, but I’m already a member anyway and so is my sister-in-law, who, she recalls, signed up to free Burma during the last tour. Is Burma free now? We don’t ask. But a young woman wearing an Amnesty International t-shirt does stop and ask if she can talk to us. She prefaces her comments with the typical “I’m-not-here-to-pressure-you, just-give-you-some-information” spiel, but U2 fans are notably supple toward anything that smacks of Bono, and this has Bono written all over it.

I’m wondering what international cause it will be this time. Political prisoners in Sudan? Justice for the Khmer Rouge? Free Mongolia? Surprisingly, this time the cause is maternal health during pregnancy and childbirth in the U.S., especially among poor and minority populations where, we’re told, the U.S. ranks fiftieth in the number of maternal deaths or something. They’re aiming for healthcare, I say to myself, and more pointedly, for white suburban guilt, which I’ve got, even though it’s white small town guilt in my case, but okay, we do sign up which just means giving our names and email accounts. The young lady is a student at St. Olaf College in Northfield, studying such a long list of improbably serious topics that I catch my breath and can’t reproduce it in its entirety for you here, but know it includes sociology and women’s studies and something about race relations.

I also see some people walking around in t-shirts proclaiming “U2 green team” and now, I think to myself, this is getting entirely too predictable. I hear from some former high school students of mine ahead of me in line—who admit to being U2 fans for about a month—that the team goes around explaining how green their semi-trucks are. The tour trucks are parked behind us on this closed off street: shiny red ones with pure white trailers. One of the students, now an engineering student at SDSU, says under his breath, “I don’t care how green they are, they still get eight miles to the gallon.”

About this time, after standing for the last forty-five minutes in anticipation of the (false) promised move at 4:00, we do begin to move, and the line cheers. We move through the desolation in front of us: empty water bottles, newspapers, pizza boxes, chairs, Styrofoam coolers, umbrellas, blankets, pool floaties, and a tent, all momentary comforts now abandoned like this is the rapture. As we walk by the green team, one of them has the gall to say, “U2 recycles, so should you.”

We’re slowly funneled down toward TCF Bank Stadium (“free checking”) and the mouth marked Gate C. Through the gauntlet of semidarkness, I can see the light of the field ahead. If this is a pilgrimage, that’s the goal, the shrine. But perhaps, as in Canterbury Tales, the real reward has been the stories of my fellow pilgrims. And, I must admit, as in Flannery O’Connor’s, “Revelation,” as I walk toward the goal, I’m firmly one of this crowd: we’re all bearing equal baggage, all caught up in the mass impulse, in the danger of being a collective, in the search for something emotive and human and technologically enhanced, for something momentary yet lasting.

If the future belongs to crowds, the future is upon me as I’m swept by a river of humanity and desire down a tunnel but toward some distant light.

Tessman, Renee. “U2 fans weather the storm waiting for outdoor concert.” Kare 11 News. Online. 23 July 2011.

Music and Politics: U2 and the Country of Adolescence

At the end of spring semester, I know it’s coming. It’s most often an honest question from both colleagues and non-teachers alike, though sometimes the latter’s fascination with “summers off” borders on an obsession. Still, in whatever form, the question still comes: “What you got planned for the summer?” Even though I answer this question more assuredly as a college teacher than I did as a high school teacher, this year I find myself fishing for an answer that will satisfy. “Some grad school work; reading and writing of course; parenting.”

Then there’s this: I hold tickets to two concerts this summer, both of them for U2 concerts, in separate cities, and a significant portion of our summer plans revolve around these events. Even though U2 has a certain amount of credence in Christian higher ed circles, thanks especially to “Christian themes” in their lyrics and Bono’s global activism on behalf of the poor, I still feel apologetic, still feel beholden to the critic in me that says things like “Rock concerts are so low brow”; “What are you, a groupie?” and “U2, what genre is that, nursing home rock?”

To be fair, U2 has aged pretty well and for that I’m, well, proud of them. While many bands fade with a decade or burn out in the night sky that is rock and roll, U2 has remade themselves a couple of times and has continued to grow to the point where they have become a significant global influence. The reason I’m proud of them, of course, is that this ultimately reflects positively on me as a fan. After all, I discerned all of this as a teenager, selecting them from the wasteland of 80s music as a prophetic voice in the postmodern rock and roll landscape.

Whatever.

In reality, I latched onto them when I was, as they say, pretheoretical, at the ripe old age of 12 when my 17-year-old sister got The Joshua Tree for her birthday. Was she the prescient one? Considering that she was split at the time between the singles “With or Without You” and Cutting Crew’s forgotten “Died in Your Arms Tonight” that also seems doubtful.

No, if I’m honest with myself, my love for U2 is probably akin to almost any adolescent fascination with rock music. But I reserve the “almost.” Throughout the years, U2 have climbed the charts with such varied songs as “With or Without You,” “One,” “Numb,” and “Vertigo”; they have fostered fledgling faith with songs like “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and “The First Time”; they have given voice to our collective sense of tragedy—see their post 9/11 Superbowl performance—and triumph—see “The Saints Are Coming,” and they have shamelessly plugged Amnesty International and Jubilee 2000. The point here is that U2 have moved fans beyond just the effect of adrenalized rock to something more. And for that, I think, they do deserve some thanks from many of us.

While I could argue that it was in the area of fledgling faith that U2 have most impacted me personally, as I drive off toward U2 sightings this summer, I credit them most with my own, well, political awakening.

How to explain the political atmosphere in the early 80s in the Middle America where I grew up? Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer from the South who talked slow and thought slower; Ronald Reagan was a movie star from California whose slick hair matched his slick talk. More importantly, one of them was a democrat who we never voted for, the other was a republican who we always voted for, but, most importantly, they were as unreal as the other superhero programs that came to us through the TV including Dukes of Hazard, Wonder Woman, The Incredible Hulk, and Dallas. This was proved when Reagan was shot, the footage playing over and over again in chaotic slow motion.

No, politicians were far away from us, if they existed at all, and the only way they really touched us was in the same way the air touched us, in a way that you don’t really stop to consider—or need to.

So, when dad started taking me to neighbors’ farm auctions where a mob assembled and took turns raising white notecards to take away that neighbor’s stuff, why blame the air? When I drove dad’s prized tractor to the local consignment auction and dad was prescribed lithium, was that the air’s fault? When mom and dad whispered in the kitchen and in the bedroom and told me and my sister that dad was going to California to work for a season and that we might join him there if he liked it well enough, the air had nothing to do with it. This was nothing historical or political, even when it got some press and its own name, “the farm crisis.” This was just the way things happened to go, the air you happened to breathe.

But when people questioned the air, organized into groups that pointed out the air quality, that was something evil. One story was about a group called “Groundswell,” who went around to these farm auctions and intimidated would-be buyers, real thugs in my mom’s version of the story, thugs who would threaten to rough you up if you took your neighbor’s stuff. “It was the bankers who were the real enemies here,” went the thugs’ line of argument, “so if we drive auction prices down to nothing, what would they do? They’d have to let us stay on the land—after all, we’re all in this together.” While this sounded like good logic, my parents made clear that it was really the devil’s reasoning.

Because, of course, politics in Middle America in the 1980s was also bound up with—although separate from—God. A good God had instituted a land of the free, home of the brave, and He would see that it was governed by the people and for the people, and while the government was like God’s screw-up nephew, it was nonetheless instituted by God and therefore none of your business.

The next step from “Groundswell,” the connecting argument went, was what happened thirty miles up the road from our farm, where two bankers were lured out to a farm and shot dead by the farmer and his son. No, it was either breathe the air or commit murder. There was no middle ground.

It was in this context that I heard “Bullet the Blue Sky” for the first time, a song my sister and I couldn’t make heads or tails of until we read in Time Magazine that Bono had written it while in El Salvador, about the conflict there. Conflict? It was in this context that we heard “Pride (In the Name of Love),” a tribute to Martin Luther King, a black man from the 1960s. 1960s? A black man?

Then, in the fall of 1989, my sister got me the movie Rattle and Hum, a rather unremarkable rockumentary, according to most critics, filmed during the American leg of the Joshua Tree Tour. Of course, I loved it as one loves anything that calls to one from the country of adolescence. The pinnacle of the film is a performance of “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” at McNichols Arena, in Denver, Colorado, on November 8, 1987. It’s filmed in dingy black and white, as is much of the film. Bono is bare-armed, sweaty, wearing something that looks like sweat pants and a sleeveless vest. His shoulder-length hair has, well, the perfect body to it. It’s roughly my wife’s 80s ‘do without the wings. Cool.

“Well here we are the Irish in America,” Bono begins. The crowd screams. However, this is not the “look at us, the greatest rock band in the world moment” that Bono is prone to. No, Bono, still true to grandiose Bono fashion, is going to lecture the crowd at a rock concert about Irish history. “The Irish have been coming to America for years,” he intones, “going back to the Great Famine, when the Irish were on the run from starvation, and a British government that couldn’t care less.” The Irish are still coming to America in 1987, Bono goes on to argue, “a lot of them are just running from high unemployment, some run from the troubles of Northern Ireland, the hatred of the H-blocks and the torture, others from wild acts of terrorism like we had today in a town called Enniskillen, where eleven people lie dead, many more injured, on a Sunday, Blood Sunday.”

My dad was a news watcher. In those days the violence of the IRA was pretty high profile. I had seen footage of grim, beleaguered-looking people juxtaposed against bulked up military personnel with machine guns, and I had seen rubble in blind streets set against dingy skies, the aftermath of bombs.

The song proper starts with Edge’s simple guitar picking, an ascending and descending pattern that’s meant to be haunting—and succeeds. When Bono sings, “I can’t believe the news today,” it’s perfectly fit to that day in 1987. Bono’s vocals are elegiac, this is a dirge, and the sorrow in this performance lingers through multiple verses, longer than the album version of the song. When the drums and bass do kick in, they come in hard and fast and we launch almost immediately into Edge’s guitar solo, which is so sharp as to be grating, searing.

Then, while the band goes into a holding pattern, Bono goes on an impassioned rant, remarkably coherent and, to one viewer at least, almost poetic considering the circumstances. Very early on, the rant denounces the violence of Enniskillen with a convincing if startling “Fuck the revolution!”—which you can imagine really got one adolescent’s attention—but it gets more sorrowful and reflective from there. It ends with Bono engaging what I imagine to be a relatively clueless Coloradan audience in a call and response that begs for an end to the violence. “No more!” he screams, and they echo over and over, and at one point his voice overpowers the Mic, before resolving into the song lyrics, “Wipe your tears away.”

While the rant is done, the song isn’t. There’s still hope to go in the song: Edge’s high octave picking seems like sunlight piercing the darkness surrounding the McNichols stage, and, while the driving guitar returns and the song ominously promises, “The real battle yet begun…” the phrase finishes with, “We’ll claim the victory Jesus won on…Sunday, Bloody, Sunday.” In the McNichols version, this phrase is almost downplayed, you have to know the lyrics, as if the lads don’t want the resolution to the violence that is the condition of the world to seem too cheap, too easy to pronounce, with or without Christ.

No, I didn’t think about all this then. I was an eighth grader. Watching this scene unfold, I simply got goose bumps. This was something that meant something. This was how words could take a stand on something—could affect something? Maybe. But could move people, I knew, because they moved me. However, I would certainly hide this from mom and dad because, no matter what the circumstances, they wouldn’t understand the F-word.

Of course, there were other things that endeared the performance to me beside the politics: the F-word made it contraband; the fact that most of my friends listened to Motley Crue, Poison, and Warrant drove me to the imagined high road that was U2; the simple adrenaline of the song even meant that the performance found its way to becoming a pre-game ritual before JV basketball games. Weird.

Still, world news was never quite the same again for me. Revolution, protests, violence, elections—these things mattered, I came to understand.

Years later, as a senior in college, on a study abroad semester, as a passenger on a bus, I would pass through a border with machine-gun toting guards armored to the hilt, protecting a fenced and barb-wired compound that marked the beginning of Northern Ireland, and I would pass, quite unexpectedly, through the town of Enniskillen, would want to stop and get off and look at the place, the monuments and placards remembering the dead. Instead, with that emotion from the country of adolescence washing over me, I would recount the song and Bono’s impassioned speech, word for word.

Years after graduating from college, with the critical thinking skills that I paid handsomely for, I also learned about the wave of factors that drove my family out of farming in the eighties—factors that ranged from ideas like “manifest destiny,” to politics like the Cold War, to policy that valued efficiency and technology at the expense of people, to poor personal choices—and I would come to understand the profound importance of a movement like “Groundswell.”

So that’s my justification for my summer plans. As I ride off toward major metropolitan areas to see the lads from Dublin in mammoth stadiums full of wealthy middle-class thirty- and forty-somethings—sometimes with their children in tow, as I saw during the last tour—who’ve paid handsomely for their tickets—one blogger says the mean ticket goes for $159.72, even though my tickets are the cheapest and in front of the stage, a place reserved for members of U2.com (yes, it’s that bad)—I do so because they still call to me from that magic country of adolescence, but also because they called me out of that country and taught me that words matters, that a stance on something and willingness to speak out about it matters.

Recently, in a concert in Mexico City, Bono addressed that country and its partner in drugs and violence, the United States. “Why is it that all we hear on the news is how drugs are smuggled through Mexico to the United States?” Bono reportedly asked. “And we don’t hear about all the automatic weapons that are being smuggled into Mexico from the United States. Nine thousand registered arms dealers on the other side of the border. Nine thousand.”

Of course, there’s room for significant critique of Bono’s ego, his politics, and his concert diatribes crafted specifically for the local audience. But words and politics do matter. They should matter to us, and we should teach them to our children. As U2 ages—I half expect Bono to come on stage with a walker this summer, but no, that’s much too undignified for him—I wonder about the future, about who will arise to arouse a generation to the condition of world events. Coldplay, of course, is the heir apparent, a wildly popular band with a slightly younger demographic. However, at least among college students, the music scene is increasingly fractured: a band’s shelf-life is shorter than Wonder Bread genres and subgenres explore market niches that seem to attack the monolith that used to be pop music; “albums” themselves are almost a thing of the past, replaced by singles you consume off the ITunes dollar menu; then again, Lady Gaga comes out with a worldwide promotional package for her new album that has her posing on the cover of every magazine, visiting every talk show and sit com she can, and pairing with every popular form from FarmVille to Starbucks in an attempt to seemingly take over the world itself. In this landscape, the idea that we could take a band—a media construct—seriously, that it could, as I have claimed, “call us out of the land of adolescence,” seems laughable. Global popular culture in any form seems increasingly distant from political realities. In fact, politics seems increasingly distant from political realities.

Maybe, then, my U2 fetish is a sign of my own age. In a world of uncertainty, I cling to what I know, to the good old days. Granted. Maybe we’re at the point where U2 can’t do what they used to anymore. Maybe they’re permanently part of that scrap heap known as classic rock.

Still, I stick by what I said earlier. Recently, my wife had a facebook friend write to her, “Tell your husband thanks. Twenty-one years ago, he introduced me to a little Irish band called U2.” The point here is not my proselytizing on behalf of U2—although I do think it merits some back stage passes—but that for generations of fans, U2 have moved us beyond just the effect of adrenalized rock to something more aware, something perhaps more active, something definitely more fully human. And for that, I think, they do deserve some thanks. One could do worse, it seems to me, than be a lover of U2.

A tree is the perfect foil to gravity; gravity and its insidious ability to make that sweet pull downward at the end of the day seem like desire.

Fruit falls from the branch, as do leaves, so we know at least that a tree too is subject to the law.

But with all its force and strength a tree goes unequivocally in two directions at once. Poised at ground level, it finds the air above free and unexplored and the earth liquid with possibility. The greater the pressure gravity exerts upon it, the stronger and more obstinate it grows. A tree refuses any single, overweaning influence.

While living in complete compliance.

As one who is called both to the centre of the earth and to the sun.

All of that isn't much more than an observation, sweet one, a thoughtful one, but not much more, really. And yet, it sticks to me, heart and soul. The image is something I can't get out of my vision.

From a business point of view, it really has no market value. It can't employ anyone; I could put it on a t-shirt and try to sell it, but it's probably too long. I can't affix my having read it to my resume; nobody would hire me because I like it. I can't sell it, really. It's only a loving observation about trees, but it's one that I can't quite shake because, in some odd sense, this morning I'll look out at the trees on my yard in a way that's slightly different; I'll see them as creatures, like me, growing between time and eternity--look at that last line.

It's from Naked Trees, a series of prose poems by John Terpstra. He wrote it, I read it, and, my guess is, it isn't doing either of us any good financially.

But I feel rich, if I use rich as a metaphor. I'm richer for having read it. Thoreau might say that my bank account has grown, my portfolio is stronger because more diverse, and, I'm considerably better off if I see trees all around me as co-habitors God's own blessed world.

It's that kind of wealth of soul that attracts me to literature and has for more than 40 years. Observations, reflections, stories and poems--I'm vastly better off having read them, having found myself in them, having discovered my place. When I bike to school past those huge old lindens north of the house this morning, I'll feel just a little more well-heeled.

And now the question is, when I get to campus, can I sell that to students?

____________________________________________________
John Terpstra, a fine poet and non-fiction writer, will be visiting those very students in a week or so, and I've created a blog with all kinds of similar Terpstra reflections and observations, which you can sample, freely, simply by going there--terpstradordt.blogspot.com. Who knows, maybe you'll get rich. Just click on the the pic at the top of the column to the left.

Morning Prayer--a poem

The speaker in this morning's poem from Writer's Almanac is kind of a scold--maybe that's why I like him, or her. Once he or she identifies himself or herself, he seems more than ready to stand up and hold forth in manner of the prophet Jeremiah.

That tone of voice is in me too as I start the year with another gang of kids who are all, so noticeably, yet another year younger. I feel more and more, well, grandfatherly, more and more as if I ought to just shut the notes and deliver a sermon about what old men know and young kids sure as heck don't. This morning's poem makes me want to raise a pointer and preach. Listen.

Drugstore by Carl Dennis

Don't be ashamed that your parents
Didn't happen to meet at an art exhibit
Or at a protest against a foreign policy
Based on fear of negotiation,
But in an aisle of a discount drugstore,
Near the antihistamine section,
Seeking relief from the common cold.

See what I mean? He uses the command form, in the negative too. Don't do this, don't do that. Don't be thinking you somehow lack privilege or stature or romance, he says. Just don't, because you ought to be proud. . . Listen.

You ought to be proud that even there,
Amid coughs and sneezes,
They were able to peer beneath
The veil of pointless happenstance.

Same voice. You ought to be taken with the fact that your folks could climb above their silly serendipity and see that somehow the man or woman they'd somehow run into with the cough syrup was, potentially at least, some thing much bigger and better than sore throat relief.

Here is someone, each thought,
Able to laugh at the indignities
That flesh is heir to. Here
Is a person one might care about.
Not love at first sight, but the will
To be ready to endorse the feeling
Should it arise.

I really should run this poem off and show it to my students. Don't know if they'd get it, but it would be good for them. Don't be disregarding who you are or what you come from because the fact is that somebody back there was alive and kicking and paying attention, and that's a good thing because. . .

Had they waited
For settings more promising,
You wouldn't be here,
Wishing things were different.

Yeah. Take that, kids. This little verse has the voice of a Calvinist. Quitjerbitchin'.

Why not delight at how young they were
When they made the most of their chances,
How young still, a little later,
When they bought a double plot
At the cemetery.

Ouch. I'm 62 and we haven't made such plans.

Look at you,
Twice as old now as they were
When they made arrangements,
And still you're thinking of moving on,
Of finding a town with a climate
Friendlier to your many talents.

Maybe I better cool it on the retirement plans.

Don't be ashamed of the homely thought
That whatever you might do elsewhere,
In the time remaining, you might do here
If you can resolve, at last, to pay attention.

I don't know that my students would get it, but, dear Lord, I do. Think lillies. Pay attention.

I believe, Lord--help thou my unbelief.

On Revelation 5 and Reading Literature

“You are worthy to take the scroll and open its seals”


With my son, I read Revelation 5:11-14 as part of the opening of worship at our church last Sunday. This time of year, worship services and my preparations for teaching literature converge. I mine sermons for teaching ideas, my prayers veer into to do lists, and every scripture is a text I might be teaching. Sometimes, it’s a fruitful distraction.

Here’s what I thought as I prepared, delivered, and reflected on part of John’s vision.

One way (not the only way) to read the book of Revelation is to see that it tells us very familiar things, but it does so in memorable, striking (okay, even weird) ways. And those ways have largely to do with images (scrolls, golden bowls, seven eyes and horns, a Lamb with its throat slit). This view respects the good old Reformed principle of interpretation which says that Scripture interprets Scripture: one book/passage/text is explained by/reinforces another.

So what does Revelation 5 tell us that’s old news—even if it’s good news?

• Jesus is Lord (10,0002 angels worship him; “To him who sits on the throne . . .”)
• Jesus is Savior (“Then I saw a Lamb”; “You are worthy . . . because you were slain”)
• Our universe is careening towards fulfillment, a consummation in which God is all in all and the universe unites in worship and praise (vss. 13-14, mostly)
• Whatever will be, our God reigns (the entire passage)

These truths—call them doctrines, if you will, or gospel—are presented to us as a kind of drama, as a story that involves a weeping man, a scroll, the appearance of a Lamb on a throne, loud voices, numberless creatures.

A couple of literary responses suggest themselves. One is that reading the chapter is a kind of experiencing of those doctrines—a participation through words and images of what those truths feel like. I take it as part of the high calling of literary studies that Scripture employs this kind of approach.

A second is that images tell the truth, that fiction (story) is as true as precept. I’m not implying that Revelation is made up, that it’s fiction. But it’s not a Pauline discourse on Christ’s supremacy; it’s a vivid illustration and engagement with those truths.

What’s the point? First, that studying literature—being attuned to images and story—brings in a harvest of rich reading of Scripture. My literary reading enhances my ability to read Scripture. And, second, as implied above, Scripture, by its method, sanctions a literary approach to truth. Telling a good story, wrapping a truth in vivid, allusive metaphors is a way to tell the truth. And engaging with a literary approach to Scripture as well as a truth-seeking approach to literature is a way to join the “four living creatures” who say “Amen” and fall down to worship the Lamb on the throne.

The Soul of an Indian

A Dakota man, in fact a direct descendant of Charles Eastman, said at a conference I attended last week that he carried his great-grandfather's book, The Soul of an Indian, with him wherever he went. Then he reached in his pocket and pulled it out, a book I've never read.

So I listened to The Soul of an Indian yesterday on the way to Chicago and loved it. I'm not silly about such things. What Charles Eastman describes as the religion of Native peoples may well be a bit over-the-top in its generous portrayals; it struck me as being--how shall I say it?--a bit "golden-age-ish." But then who am I to judge the authenticity of another person's spirituality or portrayal of such--red or yellow, black or white? Nope. Yesterday, I just listened.

There's a line that's just a paragraph or two into the book that's really stuck with me, although other things have as well: "The religion of the Indian is the last thing about him that the man of another race will ever understand."

That strikes me as absolutely right. I don't honestly know why I've become so fascinated by the stories of Native America, although it may have something to do with the fact that I live in Sioux Center, in Sioux County, which is 12 miles east of the Big Sioux river and about equa-distant between Sioux City and Sioux Falls--and yet I don't know that in the 40 or so years that I've lived here I've ever yet encountered a Sioux Indian. For that, I've had to head north and west and south.

I've spent long hours reading about the Sioux Indian wars, about Navajo and Zuni histories--novels and chronicles, new and ancient. But what Eastman says struck me totally as true: after all that reading and travel, I don't know that I still understand the traditional religion of Native people.

When we visited Japan several years ago, I read a great deal about the Japanese and decided their faith was vastly too difficult to understand. Here you have a people who, in some ways, have few of the vestiges of what Western folks would consider "religion." A corner shrine in one part of the house maybe, somewhere in the community a temple--but no family alter to speak of, no Sabbath, and few rituals. Yet, travel books make it very clear that religion is central to Japanese life.

This morning I got an e-mail from an old friend, one of those viral things you're fully expected to pass along to all other concerned American citizens. It's deeply anti-Islamic, a screed that promises all of America will morph into Detroit in a decade or so if good people don't stand up and vote the scoundrels out. It's a Christian thing. Of course, it's a Christian thing.

Eastman says in The Soul of an Indian that Native people couldn't really understand what the missionaries were talking about when they brought "the white man's religion" because so many white people they met didn't appear to share the love and peace and moral character that this Jesus guy preached.

All of which leads me to believe that Eastman was only half right. Let me edit the argument this way: "The religion of the Indian [add: any human being] is the last thing about him [add: or her] that the man [add: or woman]of another race [add: or tribe or fellowship] will ever understand."

You don't have be aboriginal to be misunderstood. Most of the time I think I don't understand my own faith.

At the college where I teach--a deeply confessional place, really--I've had wonderful students, students I really, really loved, who graduate to becoming sanctified disciples of Jim Wallis on one hand, or Glen Beck on the other. It's hard to imagine their brothers in the Lord.

I loved The Soul of an Indian, but I bet I'd love The Soul of a Christian just as much, as long as it was written as generously as Eastman's portrait of Native spirituality.

Telling the truth--at least about white Christians, my people--would be a whole lot thornier, or so it seems to me.

____________________

Charles Eastman's life is quite incredible. The son of a white military hero and a Dakota chief's granddaughter, he was raised Dakota, but taken by his father into Christianity and reservation life once his father returned from the 1862 Dakota War. He graduated from Dartmouth and Boston College's School of Medicine and served at Pine Ridge in the years surrounding the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. HBO used his life selectively for a TV movie titled Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. He married a woman almost as interesting as he was--Ellen Goodman, who taught school at Pine Ridge at the same time he was there. I used Ms. Goodman's character as prototype for a character in my own novel Touches the Sky. Eastman wrote 11 books in an attempt to allow white America to better understand Native people.

Little House on the Capricious Prairie

I know my parents took us to Walnut Grove when I was growing up. It was during our Minnesota vacation. We stopped at Walnut Grove on the way to northern Minnesota where we waded in the headwaters of the Mississippi at Itasca and visited the iron range, even taking a shaking, screaming elevator miles down an old mine shaft, our ears popping, the tour guide making us look for our hands in front of our faces to no avail before he allowed us to turn our lights on. The whole experience emphasized to me something I’d been only faintly alert to before the trip: adults enjoy intimating to kids the subterranean horrors of hell. I know we stopped at Walnut Grove because I’ve seen a picture of my sister and me in front of the Laura Ingalls’ dugout sign, her in a bonnet and me in shorts. It made that big of an impression on me.

I’d never read Laura Ingalls Wilder until I had a daughter of my own. Growing up, I was sure all those books were for girls. My sister read them. All. She also had to be done with supper on Thursday nights to watch the new episodes of the TV version of Little House on the Prairie. Clearly, girls playing dress up were the center of the show and their parties and dating were the driving force of the plots. Later, when the re-runs ran after school and I saw little Carrie fall in the same spot on the grassy California hills with sunflowers every day, it solidified why Laura Ingalls Wilder was not for me. Through high school “Walnut Grove” was significant because it came at the end of “Westbrook-Walnut Grove” or WWG, a rival high school down the ridge to the east.

I got literary in college, then came back home, then had a daughter to whom I began reading Laura Ingalls Wilder, books filled with crayfish and leeches and wolves, with prairie fires and locusts and snowstorms, with expansive skies and tall grasses and creeks that looked nothing like the sundrenched settings of southern California from the TV show. “I thought they were girls’ books,” I confessed to my oldest sister.

“No way,” she retorted, about twenty-six years too late. “And Farmer Boy is the best one.”

Farmer Boy, it turns out, is about Almanzo Wilder, Laura’s real-life main squeeze. On the show, he was played by Dean Butler, and since we would be returning from Northfield on the weekend of the Walnut Grove annual pageant when Dean Butler was to make an appearance, we decided to surprise my daughter, take an alternative route home that ran through Walnut Grove, and stop for autographs and the pageant.

Mr. Butler was scheduled for autographs from 7-8, so we left Northfield, sight of a famous Jesse James robbery gone terribly wrong, at 4:45, leaving us 2:15 to descend to the Minnesota river valley at Mankato, sight of the greatest mass execution in U.S. history, before emerging from out of that same valley at New Ulm, sight of one of Minnesota’s most famously ethnic settlements and our very own Octoberfest, through Sleepy Eye, a town ironically complete with a billboard picturing the Dakota leader of the same name, and out onto the beginnings of the Great Plains, the easternmost sliver that was originally tall grass prairie but where today the tyrant maize has mainly colonized the land and, at the time of travel, was just beginning to tassel.

We were, I suppose, somewhat ironically retracing the trip that Pa Ingalls had made after he’d lost the crop to locusts one year in Walnut Grove when he headed back east to Mankato and then beyond to find work. Even in a Toyota Sienna minivan, however, I found the distance unpredictable, more expansive than it looked on the map. All that space, especially once we emerged on the high prairie west of New Ulm, was still a long crawl on the face of earth. I drove and watched the time and ate strawberry Twizzlers and gauged whether or not we would catch Dean Butler.

We turned into Walnut Grove at 7:32, ran down the power windows to ask some people outside the museum whether Dean Butler were not signing autographs out at the pageant grounds. He was. We followed the brown signs one more mile west, driving right over the sudden thicketed ravine that was marked Plum Creek, then half a mile south and pulled into the grass field parking lot on the line marked by the street sign “Mary.” 7:35 on our clock that was 8 minutes ahead of satellite time (via cell phone). By the time we hoofed it over grass clumps to the ticket windows, it must have been very close to 7:30 on the dot.

Sure enough, there in a cordoned-off chunk of field sat a graying man in his fifties, the autograph line snaking back and forth with wood stakes and plastic runners, about fifteen people in line. “We made it,” my wife and I grinned at each other. That was before we realized that they’d closed off the line.

“He’s got to finish and go see the actors backstage,” the lady blocking the entrance told us. “He’ll be at the museum tomorrow from 9-10.” Like that helped us. This seemed all too Hollywood. Chances were he’d go back to his RV tonight and be inebriated tomorrow.

Our two boys were getting antsy so I bought our tickets--$10 a pop for anyone 5 and over; thank the maker my youngest is 4 for another two weeks—and took them in while my wife and daughter waited for a last chance at an autograph. We spread out our blankets on a hillside behind wooden folding chairs that were all reserved tickets just as a local mixed ensemble began singing some gospel and old country and western songs. They stood on the “stage” made of grass and lit by flood lights from a framework above. Stage left was the Livery Stable and Olson’s Mercantile; stage center was a sort of barn-like structure partitioned off on our side by large white sheeting; and stage right stood a mound of grass with a door in it that represented the famous Ingalls dugout as well as a pond landscaped with rock that represented Plum Creek itself.

Right away when we sat down we heard the rumblings. All day we’d ridden at the edge of cloud, a great mother ship that had been threatening all day, closing off the expanse of sky to the north. We had dipped out of it at Mankato but then driven back into it as we turned northwest toward New Ulm. We’d watched it all day, as one does with weather on the prairie, watching each day’s fate unfold on the great canvas of sky. Now, the cloud had knotted itself into an angry little system.

By the time my wife and daughter showed up—they’d gotten an enthusiastic “Hi” out of Dean Butler but no autograph—things were more desperate. Soon the announcement came: There’s a shower to the east of us; please go to your vehicles to wait it out and it a few moments when it’s passed we’ll return for the performance.”

So we moved to our van on Mary row, abided the humidity, inhaled the breath of cool brought by the wind cloud, felt our breast bone shudder at the deep thunder, before finally absorbing the wind-driven sheets of the storm proper. We could see the hem of the cloud just to the northwest, where no doubt a northwesterly would be driving cooler, drier air. But to our southwest, the storm continued to pile up in deep, slatey grays that meant more rain. This is what it means to await one’s fate on the prairie.

And hunker down and wait we did, like good prairie squatters. Eventually the northwesterly did win, but by the time we got back to our seats it was after 10:00, blustery and cool. We snuggled under our blankets as if it were fall.

The pageant itself proved to be a greatest hits of Laura Ingalls Wilder. They drove impressive horses and wagons through several times; they raised a church; they projected locust outlines on the white sheets; Laura and Nelly fought; they produced a line of fire through the grass that especially impressed my youngest son who plugged his ears and strained his eyes wide; and they did a country danced that impressed my daughter.

One of the themes the pageant focused on was Charles Ingalls’ wanderlust which took the family from Wisconsin to Kansas, back to Wisconsin, then over to Walnut Grove, down to Burr Oak, Iowa, back to Walnut Grove and then finally west to De Smet, South Dakota. In the pageant, Ma Ingalls is especially wearied by his movements; it’s something my wife has also commented on in our reading of the tales.

Then again, hanging on to a chunk of the prairie is no easy task. This same weekend I had finished Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, the story of the Larry Cook family’s acquisition and loss of a farm of those significant measurements. In the novel, Cook’s grandfather bought the Iowa farm, sight unseen, only to find it completely under water. Once it was tiled out, however, the land was a gold mine, and through shrewd bargains that, typical of small communities, made them no friends, the Cook family consolidated the land into the monumental figure that gives the book its title. Despite the family’s seeming success, however, doom hangs over the farm like a capricious prairie storm. One of Larry’s daughters, Rose, is recovering from breast cancer; another privately counts her miscarriages that are caused, the book suggests, by the chemical run off deposited in the drainage wells. After Larry signs over the farm and the sons-in-law chalk up debt in the spirit of early 80s expansionism, the storm breaks within the family, within the community, within the economy. There is no hiding from fate on the prairie. It’s there, you wait for it, and it takes you. By the time this storm passes, there’s nothing left. The legacy of the Cook family on Iowa prairie ends at a meager four generations.

In his book Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics and Promise of the American Prairie, Richard Manning would have us believe that the prairie is ultimately capricious, that we shouldn’t exactly put roots down on the prairie, that it’s meant for nomadism, movement, flexibility. His models, of course, are Native American tribes, as well as the failed attempts at settlement—the filling and then emptying—during the push of Manifest Destiny throughout the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

Of course, Manning has in mind the far west of the Great Plains, which he proposes be returned to the Buffalo Commons. The tall grass prairie of Iowa and elsewhere has made for some of the richest soil in the world—certainly that’s not a place for nomadism, is it?

There are those who would argue that small towns on the prairie have never been supposed to “make it,” that our number one export is young people, that we live perennially on the verge of dissolution. As small towns continue to dry up or cling tooth and nail to existence, as the countryside continues to empty, it strikes me that perhaps we’ve been a bit too hard on Charles Ingalls. Perhaps his movements were all very natural, perhaps they were what were called for on the prairie, perhaps we still don’t know this mysterious place we live on which rolls beneath us on the wind, as capricious as the sea.

We rolled out of Walnut Grove at 12:30. It took one hour of driving along what they call the Coteau des Prairies to get home. I probably last visited Walnut Grove when I was 8; I’m now 34. Lord willing, it won’t be another 26 years till I’ll go back. Then again, it may just depend on which way the prairie winds blow.